‘Desert Road’ Review: Kristine Froseth Can’t Escape A Muddled Single Setting Survival Thriller [SXSW]

EXCLUSIVE: Jake Choi (Single Parents) has been tapped to star in The Late Night Creep, a dark comedy from writer-director Jamie Dedeaux (Laff Mobb’s Laff Tracks).

Noah Kahan is officially on the road with his We’ll All Be Here Forever Tour and you can check out the setlist right here!

We’re getting the first look at Jeremy Renner in the upcoming third season of Mayor of Kingstown. Paramount+ has dropped the first trailer and unveiled a spring premiere date for the upcoming season which sees Renner’s Mike McClusky in a fight against a fierce Russian mob.

This is fact: Oscar-winning American Fiction screenwriter Cord Jefferson will receive the WGA West‘s 2024 Paul Selvin Award next month. The first-time feature scribe will be feted during the West Coast ceremony for strike-delayed 77th Writers Guild Awards on April 14 at the Hollywood Palladium.

A couple moved across the world in search for their dream home and were left emotional after finding 'the one'. Tiffany and George from Canada appeared on Escape to the Country and were moved to tears after packing up their life to move to Wales.

Wallows have shared their latest single ‘Calling After Me’ and have shared the tracklist to upcooming album ‘Model’ – listen to it down below.The trio – comprised of Dylan Minnette, Braeden Lemasters and Cole Preston – recently announced their upcoming album, which is set to drop May 24th via Atlantic Records. So far, the band have shared ‘Your Apartment’ as a preview.Now, they’ve released their latest teaser of ‘Model’, called ‘Calling After Me’. They said of the song: “We like that ‘Calling After Me’ is pretty fun and light on its feet for a Wallows song.

the setting of “Road House” from Missouri to the Florida Keys should go down as one of the best decisions made by a movie remake ever.The scenery is tropical, the personalities are oversize and the area inspired a song that goes, “Wasted away again.”Plus, as any skimmer of crime headlines knows, macho bar brawls are not uncommon in the boisterous Sunshine State. Really, this action-packed update of the truly ridiculous 1989 film that starred Patrick Swayze as the world’s best bouncer could almost be a documentary.

About a rough-and-tumble bar cooler with a heart of gold hired to clean up the baddest honkytonk in a small Missouri town, 1989’s “Road House” with Patrick Swayze wasn’t exactly high art, nor did it have the most sophisticated story. Still, it did the trick in the 1980s, when punch-‘em-up fisticuffs were enough as a harmless B-movie diversion (to remember fondly, not actually rewatch and enjoy, though).

The real story begins long before you know it in Desert Road, a very smart, trippy chiller that plays with the conventions of survival horror and takes them in a wholly unexpected and, ultimately, really quite moving direction. Making her directorial debut, Shannon Triplett shows a sophisticated grasp of genre dynamics, with a bold use of space — a stretch of the Mojave Desert doubling for Death Valley — that proves more and more gripping as the film’s mysteries unfold. At which point, its boundaries begin to blur, slipping between horror and sci-fi in a way that recalls a hypnotic blend of Justin Benson and Aaron Moorhead’s The Endless and Herk Harvey’s Carnival of Souls.

Sometimes, it feels like Hollywood took the wrong lessons from the “John Wick” franchise. While many producers have tried to recreate lighting in a bottle by focusing on the aesthetics of the trade—suits and neon lighting everywhere on screen—the real lesson is the celebration of the practical and a renewed reverence for the stunt professionals who make those sequences happen on screen.

For the most recent precedent for Grand Theft Hamlet, you’d probably have to go back nearly 20 years, to a 2006 episode of South Park. Titled “Make Love, Not Warcraft,” it found Cartman marshalling his friends to take on a super-advanced rogue player with a posse of killer crabs who has taken to killing everyone in his path in the Tolkienesque greenfields of Azeroth. This virtual psychopath sends shivers down the spines of the programmers at WoW’s corporate HQ (“Gentleman, we are dealing with someone who has absolutely no life…”).

Cynthia Littleton Business Editor Daisy Ridley took a moment during the post-premiere Q&A for her indie thriller “Magpie” at SXSW on Saturday night to reflect on the journey of bringing the film to life. “I remember the first day on set when I saw the trailers saying ‘Oh my god, we’re making a film.’ Now, I feel like, ‘Oh my god, we’re here,’ ” Ridley said after “Magpie” had its world premeire at the State Theater in Austin, Texas. “Magpie” hails from Bateman’s Werewolf Films, 55 Films and Align.

EXCLUSIVE: Specialty distributor 3388 Films has acquired rights to Vietnamese smash Mai, and has set a March 22 theatrical release across North America and Europe. From director Tran Thanh, the romance drama is now the No. 1 movie of all time in Vietnam, having crossed 500B VND ($20M) locally this past week. 

In the era of action films like John Wick, the bar for adrenaline-fueled entertainment has been set high, and there exists a fine line in the world of cinematic remakes that one has to draw between regard for the original and fresh perspectives. Doug Liman directs the remake of the classic 1989 film Road House, which premiered in the Headliner category at the 2024 SXSW film festival and unfortunately, this remake starring Jake Gyllenhaal, delivers a lackluster and ultimately unnecessary retread of the 1989 Patrick Swayze film.

Owen Gleiberman Chief Film Critic “Road House” is an infectiously stylish piece of slumming. It’s a remake of the 1989 Patrick Swayze cheeseball action cult film, and it’s staged with a verve and wit and dynamic grittiness that make the original film look even more rickety than it once did. Doug Liman, the director of the new “Road House,” has always been a gifted maverick, but I still like his earliest films (“Go,” “Swingers”) the best.

When dealing with an utterly preposterous premise, it’s best to dive straight into the outrageousness of it all and never let the audience have a second to question it. Writer/director Alice Lowe clearly understands the assignment with her clever new absurdist comedy, “Timestalker,” which doesn’t waste a second triggering its ridiculous but enjoyable idea.

Focus Features has firmed up release plans for Conclave, the papal thriller marking filmmaker Edward Berger‘s follow-up to his 2022 Oscar winner All Quiet on the Western Front. An adaptation of Robert Harris’ same-name bestseller, penned by Peter Straughan, the film releases in theaters in New York and L.A. on November 1st, before expanding on the 8th.

“There are many stories of chivalry, where the heroic knight saves the damsel in distress…. This is not one of them,” Millie Bobby Brown intones in a solemn voiceover at the beginning of filmmaker Juan Carlos Fresnadillo’s distinctly unexceptional fantasy film, “Damsel.” And from this day forth, let’s make a cinematic decree that no film should ever be allowed to begin with such a banal “this is not one of these stories” proclamation, and the trope should be henceforth forever banished from the kingdom of movie narratives—especially when said film is so disposable with nothing to say about its already paper-thin ideas.

EXCLUSIVE: In a competitive situation with multiple studios bidding, 20th Century Studios has reeled in theatrical distribution rights to Imagine Entertainment‘s thriller Whalefall, based on the recently published novel by bestseller Daniel Kraus.

SXSW Film & TV Festival — which runs March 8–16 in Austin, Texas — has cooked up an eclectic spread of studio crowd-pleasers, enterprising TV premieres, and indie gems aiming to break through. Here is some of the most promising fare. The canon of Ilana Glazer-led indies about childbearing expands.